10.01.2012

It's about health

I've always had an awesome metabolism, but I've also always eaten pretty heathy and worked out - with all these things combined I used to have a thin, toned body. (it's okay to hate me, but rest assured, I've wrestled with skewed body image issues like so many). In the last year a lot of things have changed - I started a real job where I sit at a desk, my real job has Dr. Pepper on tap in the break room, I met and married Husband, and I busted both my knees running. Basically I stopped a lot of my healthy habits, my exercise of choice wasn't an option, my metabolism began to slow, and I'd always take sitting on the couch with my Boyfriend/Fiancé/Husband (depending on the stage) over doing anything!

Well now that the wedding bells have chimed I'm getting back on track and this little app has helped me a ton! I simply couldn't get back into a lot of my old good habits and I was getting frustrated that I was "trying" and not feeling any healthier - so I went to something that had a stigma in my mind - calorie counting. I downloaded a calorie counter/diet tracker app called MyFitnessPal - it works on your smartphone and has an easy online interface (lots of apps I tried at first only mohad a phone version). You can track your food, water and exercise and it tells you what nutrition you're getting and how many calroes you're consuming/burning. Here's what I saw/realized:

I was drinking upwards of 600 calories of soda a day

I was exercising maybe 10-15 minutes once a week

I was snacking all the time - but since I was trying to get 'back on track' I never packed enough food so I was snacking on crap I found in the break room

I was lacking a lot of vitamins and other nutrients

Taking charge of my health again brought back so many of my other habits of exercising, drinking more water, ect. Funny how they all snowball together. Now that I'm more on track use this app sporadically, mostly I use it when I'm feeling off for a few days to center again (I wasn't feeling good last week so I pulled out this app and I realized I was really low on B12). Overall I've realized that now that I'm grown up I need to have a grown up handle on my health - so I'm trying to say goodbye to stigmas and do what I need to do.Update*You can connect with your friends on this! Great for encouragement, they can't see any specifics but just if you're hitting your goals or if you've been logging in. My coworker and I follow each other and help one another out.

2 comments:

Try it - it's wonderful! You find yourself not taking that high calorie snack or choosing to but limited elsewhere. I've been good at categorizing in a meal if it's healthy or not, but I'm not good at the cumulative day - this helped TONS!!